In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
I do not want to see BP nickel and diming these businesses that are having a tough time.
There was a time when time did not yet exist.
To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.
As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.
At this very moment, I am suffering – as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.
To have committed every crime but that of being a father.
Just as ecstasy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions.
What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights!
Once you see that everything is unreal, you can’t see why you should bother to prove it.
If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.
Every thought should recall the ruin of a smile.
Lucidity’s task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.
If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost.
Try to be free: you will die of hunger.
Society: an inferno of saviors!
All philosophers should end their days at Pythia’s feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.
If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: “I want to be praised.”